"coffeemeister" news and stories

Many a Tums commercial hangs on the notion that guzzling coffee is as bad for your reflux as downing an entire tub of pickles. But is it really the acid content that makes coffee sour your stomach?

Surprisingly, probably not. In terms of its pH, coffee actually scores lower than beer, soda and sparkling water. According to some charts, coffee falls roughly within the same range as foods we consider relatively belly-friendly, like pumpkin or figs.

So what's the deal with "acidity" and coffee? Keep reading after the jump to find out.

They don't call them "G.I. Joe" for nothing: It's thanks to U.S. service people that we have one more delicious round in our catalog of caffeinated ammunition: caffè Americano.

During the Allied occupation of Italy in WWII, American soldiers would walk up to a counter and order a caffè, only to be somewhat alarmed by the dainty little espresso cups placed in front of them. You can almost hear the Yankee accents echoing off the walls of this or that bar in Rome: "You call this coffee? Where's the rest of it?!" It wasn't long before the Italian baristas realized that what the boys from the U.S. of A. really wanted was a larger, diluted beverage: By adding hot water to the usual espresso, they could more or less replicate the soldiers' traditional hot cup of "mud."

Today, caffè Americano lives on many stateside coffeeshop menus alongside the more conventional brewed coffee, largely as a matter of taste. Some imbibers see the hot, watered-down espresso as a very fresh alternative to the average filtered brew. Many prefer the flavor or the body of the more voluminous drink, while others bicker endlessly about which concoction has the most caffeine. (Answer: It kind of depends.)

Which do you prefer: caffè Americano or just a regular ol' cuppa joe? Tell us in the comments.

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series for the caffeine-addicted.

Find yourself with some free time (i.e. can't pull yourself away from the Internet) during the long, slow afternoons between Christmas and New Year's? Yeah, me too: Sometimes it seems like the only thing I want to do when I'm not drinking coffee is scanning my coffee-related blogroll for something new and interesting. And you might be surprised how much new and interesting content there can be in the more caffeinated sectors of the virtual world.

Read on after the jump for a few of the CoffeeMeister's favorite Net spots for a good strong shot of joe.

We've come to the last of the "four Ms" needed to make everybody's favorite concentrated coffee kicker. And the last "M" is the romantic part, the human touch -- la mano, or the hand of the barista. Of course, as a professional barista trainer, I am inclined to think that this last "M" is the most important in the scheme of espresso-making. Call me biased, but seriously, you think this stuff is going to make itself?

The barista's role is perhaps more nuanced and significant even than it seems at first blush. For one thing, there's a good reason we're lumped in with all the fine-tuned mechanical details of the equipment and the blend: The barista is to be part artist, part machine. Just as la macchina is designed to the same thing every time you turn it on, so too should the barista be as consistent as possible. He or she should understand the "how" and "why" behind every step in the process -- from grinding to extracting to drinking.

A good barista can make delicious coffee; a great barista can explain how it came to be that way.

Two down and two to go in our exploration of the Italian tradition of the "four Ms" of making espresso coffee. The third part of our list also happens to be my favorite: la miscela, or the espresso blend.

The word "espresso," contrary to relatively common belief, has almost nothing at all to do with the beans themselves, but rather the magically delicious elixir they produce when put through the process. You can actually toss any beans into il molino and extract them using la macchina and what you'll have is, by most definitions, espresso.

But that doesn't mean it's going to taste very good. Find out why after the jump.